Brain Imaging: What It Can (and Cannot) Tell Us about Consciousness

ISBN-13: 9780199838721 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 180 str.

R. G. Shulman

Opis

Magnetic resonance imaging methods have taken a commanding position in brain studies because they allow scientists to follow brain activities in the living human. The ability to measure cerebral anatomy, neuronal firing, and brain metabolism has extended and re-invigorated hopes of understanding the role that brain activity plays in human life. The brain has assumed a central role in our thinking of the world that can be traced back to the philosophies that are expressed in psychology, religion, literature, and everyday life. Brain scientists, planning and measuring brain activities by imaging methods, have consciously or unconsciously been influenced by these philosophical views.

Brain Imaging: What It Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About Consciousness, in describing the experiments using imaging methods, traces how assumptions about the nature of brain function made in planning scientific experiments are the consequences of philosophical positions. Experiments that relate brain activities to observable behavior are shown to avoid the philosophical and psychological assumptions about mental processes that have been proposed to underlie these behaviors. This analysis establishes the conditions necessary for reproducible brain responses.

Recenzje

Recommended.

O autorze

Robert G. Shulman is a biophysicist who has pioneered the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and other spectroscopic techniques in Physics, Biochemistry and brain imaging. His original studies creative active fields of investigation in all these disciplines. He is the Sterling Professor (Emeritus) of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, where he formed the Magnetic Resonance Center, taught Biochemistry, Biophysics and Literature, and was Director of the Division of Biological Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Scienves and of the Institute of Medicine.